Waking Life (Cert 15)

by JASON SOLOMONS, Mail on Sunday

In Waking Life a cartoon figure wanders around a town (I think it's Austin, Texas: this is a Richard Linklater film, the indie director who made Slacker there) holding conversations about the meaning of life with professors, bar-room philosophers, writers, students, taxi drivers and a chimpanzee.

He may be dreaming, but it's a waking dream which he can shape and participate in. Everyone he meets is a cultural theorist and words like 'existentialism', ' postmodernism' and 'relativism' buzz about with reckless disregard for better words like 'irony'.

It would be an unbearable nightmare of little merit if it weren't a cartoon made by filming real actors and colouring them in afterwards.

The animation style is that of a wobbly acid trip, but you can still recognise in a cartoon cameo Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (Linklater's stars in Before Sunrise), as a couple in bed saying: 'We're all telepathically sharing our experiences to create collective memory.'

The viewer drifts from one scene to another, seemingly at random. As one wannabe novelist in a cafe says of his own work: 'There's no story, it's just gestures, fragments.'

Try pitching that to a Hollywood executive this panto season. You might get it made - as long as you write in a part for The Rock.

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